Complex construction projects often are associated with a large volume of physical documents. For example, a construction project may be associated with many reports, forms, requisitions, task checklists, work orders, etc. Entering information from the physical documents into a computing system is a time-intensive and costly undertaking. For example, employing many data entry technicians to manually enter each document into a computing system is a significant cost for the construction project. Additionally, using data entry technicians to enter the information into the computing system may pose security risks. For example, the data entry technicians have access to information on each document, such as names of employees, locations associated with the construction project, and internal company data (such as identifiers, codes, or other sensitive information).
Instead of using data entry technicians to enter information from the documents into a computer system, the documents may be scanned using optical character recognition (OCR) technology. Scanning a document using OCR creates an electronic version of the document. However, the electronic version may be an image of the document. Because the individual data fields in the documents include handwritten entries, the information represented by the handwritten entries is not extracted and converted into structured data. To illustrate, scanning the documents does not generate data indicative of the individual data fields. Instead, scanning the documents creates an electronic image of the document as a whole. Because at least some of the responses in the individual data fields are handwritten responses, OCR may not convert the responses into structured data. To illustrate, the responses may not be converted into data that can be separately stored, categorized, and analyzed (e.g., searched using database queries). Creating non-structured electronic documents (e.g., via OCR) results in a large amount of stored data that requires human resources (e.g., to read each scanned document individually or to generate structured data from the documents). This conversion process is extremely time consuming and costly.
Additionally, the scanned images are difficult to integrate into a system that also receives electronic data. For example, a system may enable an inspector to fill out an inspection report using a mobile device (e.g., a mobile phone, a tablet device, a laptop computer, etc.) instead of filling out a paper inspection report. However, the information received by the system from the mobile device may be incompatible with the scanned documents. For example, the data received from the mobile device may be in a different format than the scanned document data. Additionally, the data from the mobile device may be processed and analyzed using data processing techniques that are not supported by the scanned document data (e.g., because the handwritten responses in the scanned documents have not been converted into structured data). Thus, for scanned documents that are not integrated with data produced by mobile devices, a system that scans in documents associated with a construction project is not able to be integrated with a system that supports data collection using mobile electronic devices. Additionally, because handwritten responses in the scanned documents are not converted to structured data, data analysis and report generation based on the scanned documents is limited. Thus, the system is unable to efficiently generate managerial reports and visual representations of the progress of the construction project. Without such reporting, an owner or primary contractor of a construction project may not be able to perform project management (including complying with government regulations or industry standards) without investing significant human resources to read and process the scanned documents.